I am taking basic linguistics this semester. There are two tiresome guys in it with me. We were going over this sentence:
“Jason’s mother left himself with nothing to eat.”
Almost everyone realized that something needed to be changed. One person, however, decided to be a dumbass. “Well,” said Republican Dan (who introduces himself as such), “maybe Jason’s mother is a transvestite.”
Seriously, dude? We are 18-22 here. This is college, not middle school.
The other guy kept arguing with the prof about the International Phonetics Alphabet. He kept talking about how things were pronounced in Icelandic. It was so stupid, because the class is expressly about English linguistics.
So please, share your stories.
PS–the title for this post comes from a group on Facebook.
Girl in class, “The couple are only lesbians if one of them’s manly looking. If they’re both pretty women you know there’s got to be a man in there somewhere!”
From my undergraduate Sociology class. The professor asked the class why certain nomadic people might have had a monotheistic religion. He was trying to get at the Shepherd = God analogy. The answer he got: Since they traveled around a lot, they could compare the different religions and pick the best one.
One of my geology courses was continually slowed down by some truly braindead students. On one lab, there was a multipart question about a given geologic process, with one of the questions being “If this process were to continue, what would happen to the landscape?” One student’s answer: “If the geometric process continues, weathering will happen.”
:smack:
You’d think, having had TWO semesters of geology before that point, they’d know the difference already. (And weathering, by the way, was apparently the only thing that group of students learned; it was their answer for at least 75% all quiz/test questions)
I took a speech class as an elective in college and for our persuasive speech unit a student gave three points to prove Creationism. 8 Years later and they’re still burned in my memory.
1.) Before landing on the moon scientists figured the surface should be covered with 5 feet or more of moon dust. It was only inches deep, so the moon isn’t that old.
2.) The human population is increasing exponentially, ergo, the human population couldn’t have been on the Earth that long.
3.) The Great Barrier Reef grows at a constant rate. No scientist believes it’s older than 10,000 years.
Before the astronaughts arrived a couple of smart people went up to the moon and collected all the dust and then brought it back to Earth and they are now selling it to the public.
In a Philosophy class: dumb girl gets all indignant at the Prof answering all her questions with questions and says “I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to make us think.”
But that could be seen as minimizing the experience of true transgenders, in which case those transvestites would be dumb once over and the guy in class would be dumb twice over, but only if he knew that.